Antinuclear

“This is our Gallipoli; this is our bushfire Gallipoli,” says David Bowman, a professor of environmental change biology at the University of Tasmania. He’s talking about the bushfires that began in the spring of September 2019, that have burned in every state and territory, that have claimed at least 24 lives, that have destroyed nearly 1,800 homes, and that have turned more than 8.4 million hectares of land into lifeless charcoal. They have led to one of the largest peacetime evacuations in Australia’s history, as fire authorities in two states instructed tens of thousands of holidaymakers and residents to remove themselves from the path of several flaming juggernauts. In an echo of the Gallipoli retreat, thousands had to be rescued from beaches by the Australian navy and air force. In the face of these unprecedented fires, Australians appear to be listening less to the inner voice of the Aussie battler, and instead heeding the pleas and warnings of fire authorities.

“This is our Gallipoli; this is our bushfire Gallipoli,” says David Bowman, a professor of environmental change biology at the University of Tasmania. He’s talking about the bushfires that began in the spring of September 2019, that have burned in every state and territory, that have claimed at least 24 lives, that have destroyed nearly 1,800 homes, and that have turned more than 8.4 million hectares of land into lifeless charcoal. They have led to one of the largest peacetime evacuations in Australia’s history, as fire authorities in two states instructed tens of thousands of holidaymakers and residents to remove themselves from the path of several flaming juggernauts.

In an echo of the Gallipoli retreat, thousands had to be rescued from beaches by the Australian navy and air force. In the face of these unprecedented fires, Australians appear to be listening less to the inner voice of the Aussie battler, and instead heeding the pleas and warnings of fire authorities.Eleven years ago, the mind-set of bushfire response was different. Before the devastating Black Saturday bushfires in the southeastern state of Victoria, which killed 173 people over two cataclysmic days in 2009, the accepted wisdom on bushfires was “stay and defend, or leave early.” After Black Saturday, a new category of bushfire warning was introduced, labeled “Code Red” in Victoria, and “Catastrophic” in New South Wales. The unambiguous message of the new warning was “for your survival, leaving early is the only option.”……

what happens after the fires have passed through, and Australians return to either their intact homes or smoking ruins, dead cattle, a blackened moonscape where crops once grew? The lucky ones give thanks and get on with their life. The unlucky ones grieve, rage, shake their fist at Fate—and defiantly rebuild on the same ground. The battler spirit triumphs again, but for how long?

As the country suffers through one of its worst droughts on record, and heat waves shatter temperature records not once but twice within the same summer week, some are asking whether Australians can afford to keep returning to the same parched, scorched landscapes that they have occupied not just since the European invasion two and a half centuries ago, but for tens of thousands of years before that.

Even before climate change, survival—particularly of agriculture—in some parts of Australia was precarious. Farmers were so often rescued from the very edge of disaster by long-overdue rains that arrived just in time. Now the effects of climate change are making that scenario even less likely, and this bushfire season and drought are but a herald of things to come.
If people are to continue living in these places, “they’ve got to drastically change their relationship with the surrounding environment; they’ve got to drastically change the surrounding environment in order to be able to survive and reduce their vulnerability,” says Ross Bradstock, director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong. “Another option is the retreat from flammable places.”

After the Black Saturday bushfires, the state government attempted to buy back land from people in the most high-risk areas who had lost their homes in the fires. Very few took up the offer. Now there’s a record-breaking drought on top of the fire threat. Dubbo—a regional New South Wales town with a population of more than 38,000 people—has all but run out of water, with its dam at just 3.7 percent of capacity and the river supplying it forecast to dry up by May of this year. Towns in Queensland are relying on charity handouts of water, even as a planned coal mine in the region is set to access billions of gallons of groundwater. The largest remote Aboriginal community in Central Australia—along with many others that have long thrived on their traditional lands—is also running out of drinking water.

Then there are the heat waves. On January 4, 2020, western Sydney became one of the hottest places on the planet, at 120 degrees Fahrenheit (48.9 degrees Celsius). “That’s uninhabitable; you can’t live in that,” Bradstock says.

And there are floods—one-in-100-year floods have laid waste to Queensland twice in two years—and climate-change-related sea-level rise, which is predicted to be a significant issue for a nation whose population is concentrated in a narrow strip of land around its coastline.

To abandon parts of this land, though, will be a tough sell to people who have “stay and fight” ingrained in their soul. “There is definitely something about the Australian way that people want to stay and defend, and don’t necessarily want to think about moving away from the bush,” says Catherine Ryland, an urban planner and a bushfire-resilience expert.

She would like to see more conversation around the idea of planned retreat—rebuilding in low-risk locations, reducing development in high-risk areas, and even relocating existing, unaffected communities, which she describes as the “biggest, bravest, boldest step.” And some experts are starting to consider what such steps would look like: The Planning Institute of Australia has released a national settlement strategy, for instance. It highlighted both the large parts of Australia more and more at risk from the adverse impacts of climate change and the dearth of effective planning for climate change or disaster-risk reduction.

Everyone is suddenly starting to realize that we actually need to plan better for those things, instead of just keep sprawling out into the bush or closer to the ocean,” Ryland says. …… https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/01/only-way-confront-australias-wildfires/604546/